The Future of CP/M: Dead or alive? Msg #17907 posted 05/31/86 at 6:10 am by Sypko Andreae To: ALL USERS About: SPECIAL CP/M MEETING (16 lines) =====>> SPECIAL MEETING OF BAMDUA (MORROW USERS GROUP) <<====== ---------------- EVERY ONE IS INVITED ------------------------- --- When: Tuesday, June 24th, 1986, 7:30 pm ------------------- --- Where: West Branch, Berkeley Public Library --------------- --------- 1125 University Ave., Berkeley ---------------------- --- TOPIC: A meeting with five of the major influences -------- --- in the CP/M community: Dick Ezzard, Ken Fowler, ----------- --- Irv Hoff, Wayne Masters and Nancy Mulvany. ---------------- --- This promises to be a most exciting BAMDUA meeting where -- --- these people will join us in a discussion of the ---------- --- situation of CP/M and its Public Domain networking power -- --- and liveliness in the computer world today, particularly - --- with regard to its relative merits vs. those of MS-DOS. --- ----------- Be there or be square ----------------------------- --- ( BAMDUA, (415) 644-2805, PO Box 5152, Berkeley, CA ) ----- --------------------------------------------------------------- ******* BAMDUA is an active local group of Morrow users, and this was one of their regular meetings, but with a twist. The topic was "The Future of CP/M" and the panel included names familiar to anyone in the Bay Area who has hooked a modem up to their computer. In the world of computer bulletin boards, relationships take on a disembodied quality. People write messages back and forth over years yet never meet face-to-face. It leaves room for the imagination. When a luminary such as Irv Hoff actually makes an appearance, I suspect many would attend just to see the face behind the name. Who is Irv Hoff? Is he seven feet tall? Does he speak with an accent? Perhaps he's a college kid with a bad case of acne. There was even a rumor once that "Irv Hoff" was a pseudonym used by a collective group of public-domain programmers for the prolific quantity of software issued under that name. The meeting room filled quickly and from start to finish there was standing room only - one certain indication that CP/M is definitely alive and well, contrary to some of the pronouncements that would be uttered this evening. The average age was around 40, with gray hair and receding hairlines common. This was not a group of novices, but dedicated people who took the time to come and make sure there was still a viable CP/M community. The Idealistic organizer Rick Charnes, BAMDUA member who organized this panel, opened things up. He related some of his own personal evolution since overcoming a case of computerphobia 2 years ago after taking a Media Alliance workshop for writers. One of the main reasons he chose a Morrow Micro Decision was its attractive design. With no technical background, he wanted to use a computer for writing; then he purchased a modem, and nothing was the same again. "Computer bulletin boards changed my life," Rick confessed, relating a familiar story of all-night sessions on 4 hours of sleep. "Computer message boards foster an exchange of ideas, a sharing, in a way verbal communication doesn't touch," Rick said, explaining his attraction to the world of modem-izing. He has actually met more friends since getting a computer, contrary to the common image of the shut-away programmer. Rick's vision for this meeting was a celebration of what the CP/M community has done and to address the issues that will keep CP/M alive in a world increasingly dominated by IBM. He sees computer bulletin boards and the world of public-domain software as the main achievements of CP/M users. "If we can stick together, we'll stay alive." The Wizardly Sysop The first panelist to speak was Wayne Masters, an engineering administrator for Lockheed who wanted a computer to bring work home from the office. He is now one of the most renowned Sysops (System Operators) with his Potpourri RCP/M, flagship of BYE5/PBBS/MDM/IMP/KMD public-domain programmers. The BYE5 series (a program which allows a computer to be run by a remote user, an essential ingredient in setting up a board) came about because of the peculiar nature of CP/M systems. Back in 1983, anyone interested in setting up a remote system had to install half a dozen separate programs to run on their particular computer. Wayne designed BYE5 so that only one program needed to be modified. All the others (the message system, the file transfer utility) would be system-independent. Wayne suggested this is one reason MS-DOS is so popular. No tinkering is needed. Unfortunately that's not the case with CP/M which has dozens of slightly-different operating systems to contend with. Wayne prefers S100-bus systems and hoped at one time (as many early users did) that this would become the standard in the 8-bit world. Alas, it was not to be. The Far-looking editor Next up was Nancy Mulvany, editor of the Kaypro Users newsletter, BAKUP. She had logged that day onto The Well, a teleconference run by the Whole Earth Catalog crew. On the IBM conference, one topic of burning controversy is "The future of the IBM PC". The general consensus on The Well is that the PC is already obsolete. "The only people talking about whether CP/M is dead are CP/M people," Nancy observed. "You have a machine, if it works for what you want, good." She agreed that for writers, CP/M machines are excellent. For desktop publishing, don't buy a PC - instead, look to the Atari in about a year, she suggested. Nancy, too, is enthusiastic about computer boards. "Bulletin boards are the way to transcend operating systems. Get a modem if you don't have one." She recommends spending the time learning the intricacies of on-line communication and file transfer on a local board (saves on long-distance bills). Fortunately, there are hundreds of boards today, and plenty of Sysops who specifically welcome and help out the novice. Nancy talked about software publishing and the fact that all the new commercial software is for IBMs. She is the U.S. agent for H. & D. Calvert, publishers of MACREX, an indexing program written originally for the Osborne 1, then upgraded with new features for MS-DOS. The publishers asked her to assess the feasibility of re- writing the program for CP/M. After six months of thinking about it, Nancy had to recommend against the idea. She reasoned that the market for such a program would be professional indexers, most of whom don't even own computers yet. The difference in price between CP/M and MS-DOS machines is not that great anymore. What she didn't realize was that in England the market is different. CP/M is booming there. Amstrad sells a CP/M system with 256K memory, 1 drive, monitor, keyboard -- for 400 pounds (including an Epson printer!) "And they're selling like hotcakes. IBM is not king in England." In the end, Calvert decided to upgrade the CP/M version of MACREX and completely re-wrote it in the C language. Nancy held a pre-release copy in her hand. "Is CP/M dead? Don't focus on that. If you have an application that works, what more do you need? Get an Atari if you want new programs every week. What we've got is fine. What is all this stuff? One operating system is in, another is out. It's marketing." Nancy predicted that the MS-DOS world will get further away from the individual end user who deals with computers on a one-to-one basis. Where will the end users find support? "It's places like here tonight where they'll get served." The Practical philosopher Ken Fowler spoke third. Sysop of the Kaypro Users board, Ron asked how many in the audience use a modem. Over 50 people raised their hands. A dozen of that group admitted to typical $100+/ month phone bills. Six Sysops were present. Ken began by asking, "Is CP/M dead? No, but it ain't healthy. Who killed it? It's not worth worrying about. CP/M users are too set in their ways, not buying new software. The market allowed MS-DOS to shoot to the top. But that's tapering off too. Next year something else will be on top. If you're happy with CP/M, it doesn't matter if CP/M is dead." Ken uses CP/M 2.2 which does everything he wants and has an urge to do. Professionally, he writes code to run hardware -- EPROMs and such. A rule of thumb he uses is, "Don't worry what chip it's for -- you worry about cost effectiveness and if it does the job." The User's advocate Dick Ezzard, next up, was here "to represent the user. But I'm a shmoozer more than a user. If you have an application and something to do, and find a computer to do it, run by applications. Let the application drive your decision." But in all fairness, he said he would have to suggest to anyone looking for a computer to buy one of the XT or AT clones. He went to a swap meet recently looking to find a Seagate 20 Mb hard disk for his clone. After pricing all the vendors, he found one for $281 -- all he needed was to plug it in and go. For CP/M, the cost would've been closer to $800. The dirt cheap prices in the clone market are due to the intense competition. "The little guys competing, the open architecture, brings the price down for the regular users." When he first discovered bulletin boards, he was a "looker." "I watched Hoff on Compuserve help thousands. I eventually found a board in the Bay Area that I went to a lot." (This is KAY*FOG, the message system run by Bond Shands.) Dick would see messages left by callers asking for help on WordStar. He started answering questions from his experience, or by "not being afraid to go to the manual and find the answer." Eventually he was so involved that Bond twisted his arm to be the Assistant SysOp. His advice to anyone with a modem: "Hang around two or three boards until you find one that goes with your personality." His advice to anyone without a modem: "Hang a modem on your computer and for a small increase in price, you get a powerful tool that opens up the world." The Programmer's programmer When Irv Hoff was introduced as a "big name" in the computer world, he stood up to his full imposing height of 6'4" and said "You can see he means my size." Shy and retiring, like a heavy- set Mr. Wizard, in person Irv Hoff comes across as the patient genius he is. Over the years, I have seen hundreds of messasges left on computer boards asking Irv for help on one of his many public-domain programs. Always he responds with detailed instructions. The only time I ever saw him get angry was with programmers who modified one of his programs and released it with a bug and a higher version number. Irv related how he got started in radio teletype back in 1960 and worked on modem development with Keith Petersen, another pioneer in digital communications who eventually wrote the XMODEM program. Irv got his first computer in 1970, a Datapoint minicomputer with 8k circulating ram that cost $11,500. He mentioned they developed the idea for the microprocessor and got Intel to develop the 8008. Datapoint was unsatisfied with the 8008 as it was 10 times slower than specified and over a year late. The 8008 led to the 8080 and nearly everybody using a microcomputer is aware of the story from that point to present. Irv used his Datapoint computer on radio teletype and CW, being over four years ahead of other hams who eventually got the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI computer. He was the first ham in the world to have a privately owned computer on RTTY. Irv asked how many in the audience use their computers just for fun and how many for their job? It was 1/2 and 1/2. He told of a Radio Shack survey (that was never made public) which found over 3/4ths the owners of Radio Shack computers didn't use their com- puters at all, just kept it on the shelf in the closet. (This was offered with regard to "what does the typical owner of a home computer use it for?) "Public domain software is in a quandry," he said. "The easiest way to learn programming is by modifying what's already been done. But how do you modify something without altering someone else's work? If you don't put out the source code, you won't get see others add innovative ideas." Irv found that as more people got into program- ming, the old days have faded when it was just hackers who knew each other. As newcomers try their hand at modifying existing programs, too often the new version has bugs or messes up some feature that that was previously working correctly. Many people then erroneously assume the original author had put out a program that never had been working properly. Irv said he realized that a lot of people wanted to modify programs just for the solitary reason they didn't want to have "exactly what everybody else was using". In closing, Irv graciously mentioned some of the people to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude in the CP/M world. "The main reason my name is big now is because nearly all the original big names in CP/M programming went to MS-DOS. People such as: Ron Fowler (who is selling MEX now), Keith Petersen who established the first-ever RCPM (still available in Royal Oak, MI), Dennis Recla who has been working with RBBS38, Frank Wancho who developed RBBS4105, Paul Traina who wrote the OxGate BBS, Mark Ziegler and Jim Mills who developed the MODEM7 program and of course Ward Ward Christensen whose name is legendary among early users of CP/M. He said there were many, many others who had contributed to the literally thousands of free programs currently available. For all of us, I'm sure a hearty thanks is extended to Irv especially, but also all the panelists for their hard work in keeping CP/M not just alive but growing. The Inevitable questions The floor was opened for back and forth discussion, comments, questions/answers. A comment was made there are nearly 200 BBS sysemts in the San Francisco Bay area (including Oakland and San Jose areas). With all the talk of computer boards, the first question was, "How to get started using a modem?" Ken Fowler said the first thing is to know your communication program well -- how to use it to call into a BBS and then how to upload and download files. "Learn your end first. Read the .DOC files for the comm program you're running." (For example, IMP and MEX, both public-domain modem programs, come with extensive documentation.) Next, know that computer boards vary widely in the set of commands they use on their particular message system. Ken, when he first logs onto a new system, saves a file of all the commands then reads it off-line so as not to waste time (and keep other users from using the system.) Learn how to enter/read messages, how to say 'goodby', how to access the file areas. Every board will have a menu of commands. Print these out for handy reference whenever you call back. Some Sysops encourage voice calls (Wayne Masters displays his home phone number when a user first calls in.) Someone in the audience asked whether the dwindling numbers of CP/M users was leading to a reverse critical mass that would spell the end of support groups like this one tonite. Nancy Mulvany pointed out that Commodore has sold 800,000 of the Commodore 128 computers (which use CP/M+ and of course opens the door for Commodore users to the 1000s of public-domain CP/M programs). She also pointed out that there is a strong market for used CP/M machines. Irv Hoff mentioned that the ZCPR3 folks at Echelon have written complete CCP/BDOS replacements for Z80 machines using CP/M. Their devotion to 8-bit computers is almost religious. Another question was "What is being done right now in the public- domain world?" Wayne Masters answered that a curious phenomenon has taken place in the past few months. For the first 1-2 years after the IBM PCs became popular, MS-DOS public-domain programmers duplicated what had been done in CP/M. Then for a period, the MS-DOS and CP/M public-domain worlds were on an equal footing. Recently, CP/M public domain has been looking at and implementing some of the new ideas coming out of the MSDOS world. As an example KMD (the XMODEM file transfer replacement) has been a new feature using routines developed by Bob Freed to download member files from an .ARC file that has become the standard in MS-DOS. (.ARC files are compressed library files similar to .LBR files in CP/M.) The .ARC standard will eventually mean that LU and NEWSWEEP will be replaced in CP/M. Wayne said, "We're now taking stock of what they're doing but they [the MS-DOS programmers] are often quite sloppy -- they're not memory-bound. "With 640k available they could care less about efficient code." Ken Fowler, as Sysop of BAKUP (a Kaypro users board), sees more and more MS-DOS public-domain software being uploaded to his system. Since he doesn't have a clone, he can't tell what he has. He has noticed that most of the programs being released are shareware rather than strictly public-domain. (He prefers to think of them as "beggarware" -- "Some guy writes a small program that transfers a file from one directory to another and puts in the documentation that he's asking $15 for it.") There are a growing number of MS-DOS boards around. The main difference between these and the old RCPM boards is they don't allow access to the operating system. (On an RCPM, you generally exit from the message system directly into the disk area with with the familiar "A>", and browse the files online.) On MS-DOS boards, everything is done from a menu -- from seeing what files are available to choosing which ones you want to download. Someone asked what is available still in the way of CP/M data base programs. Ken Fowler answered that "Condor" may be the only data base manager still being sold. But in the long run, he thinks the true data base computers will be the new 32-bit machines ("A 68000 running at 16 Mhz. is best for data base work"). There followed a discussion of the future technology we'll be seeing in desktop computers. Ken thinks the 68000 family of CPUs will become the standard. Desktop publishing will be snickered about in a few years, as the ability to do everything on-line becomes common. "There won't be any need to publish on paper any more. You'll just call up on-line databases", Ken predicted. Irv Hoff asked, "How long before we see use of non-rotating mass storage (disk drives), and before laser disk technology is practical?" Ken thinks laser beam disk drives will replace 5" floppy disks in another ten years. (Read-only laser disks are being experimented with now, but the ability to read AND write will take a few years to develop.) Anoter member of the panel expressed the thought within two years many larger firms would be using laser beam technology. The final comment of the evening appropriately came from a satisfied user who expressed a prevalent attitude in the CP/M community: "I enjoy and get better results writing on my CP/M machine than on the Wang or the IBM at work." *******